Owls Well That Ends Well Part 23

"Derivative would be a kinder way of putting it," he said. "There have been a number of articles written over the years that claim she was a plagiarist-that she took the works of more commercially successful poets and ... well, changed enough of the words to make it look like a different poem, and pa.s.sed it off for original work."

"And did she?"

"I've always contended that she was merely strongly influenced by her favorite poets," he said. "And that her profound reverence for them manifested itself in an unconscious imitation of their forms and meters."

I took that for a reluctant yes.

"But Gordon had something that proved otherwise, right?" I asked.

"He'd gotten hold of a box of books from her library," Schmidt said. "Books of poetry by Longfellow, Tennyson-people like that. A lot of the poems were all marked up in her handwriting, showing how she'd taken their poems and produced her versions. Changing a couple of words in each line, until it looked different enough to pa.s.s off as her own."

"Hard to defend that as unconscious imitation," I said.

He nodded slightly.

"Not exactly good for your career," I suggested.

He shook his head.

A wild suspicion hit me, and I decided to run with it.

"Especially if it came out where Gordon got them," I said. "However did you let them fall into his hands?"

He winced.

"It was my wife, and her d.a.m.ned decluttering," he said. "The d.a.m.ned box had been gathering dust in our attic for twenty years. And then, while I was off in England at a conference, she went to this d.a.m.ned cla.s.s on getting rid of clutter."

"Really? Where?" I asked. Sounded useful, that cla.s.s. Maybe I could go, and take my whole family.

"I don't know," Schmidt said, frowning. "One of those places that gives stupid cla.s.ses for housewives with too much time on their hands."

"I see," I said, and hoped it didn't come out sounding too much like a snarl. I found myself hoping, for Mrs. Schmidt's sake, that he turned out to be the murderer and got a good, long prison sentence.

"Anyway, one of the stupid decluttering rules they gave her was if you hadn't opened a box for more than a year, you should get rid of it without opening it. The stupid cow called Gordon and had him clean out the whole attic."

"So Gordon not only had the goods on Mrs. Pruitt, he knew you'd found out about her plagiarism and covered it up," I said.

He nodded.

"Sounds like motive for murder to me," I said.

"Not really," he said. "I may have my shortcomings as a scholar, but I have a very well-honed sense of self-preservation. Why would I kill Gordon without getting back the evidence? Who knows who'll get hold of those books now that he's dead? But whoever it is, I very much doubt it will be anyone as greedy, grasping, and dishonest as Gordon."

"So I take it you don't have them?"

"Would I still be trying to find them if I did?"

Maybe, I thought, if you wanted to look less like a murder suspect.

"So someone else has them," I said aloud. "Or will get them, whenever they turn up. And you're afraid that someone will make them public, and you're trying to get them first."

He nodded.

"So if you didn't kill him and you didn't get your books back, just what did happen between you and Gordon yesterday?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said.

"Try again."

He pursed his lips as if afraid something incriminating would slip out. I just waited.

"Nothing happened because he was already dead when I went into the barn."

Chapter 31.

Yes! I thought. I hadn't entirely trusted the Hummel lady's story, that she'd never seen Gordon, but now I had independent confirmation that Gordon was already dead before Giles entered the barn. I wasn't sure whether to cheer, knowing that this was probably enough to clear Giles, or shake Schmidt for lying and helping to implicate Giles in the first place.

"He was already dead?" I repeated.

"Definitely dead," Schmidt said. "When I first walked in, I saw his stuff lying all around, and I figured he was there-maybe snooping in the hayloft, that was about his style. So I called out for him to come down, that we needed to talk about the books. And he didn't say anything. And I went over to the ladder to the hayloft and he was just lying there, dead, with this b.l.o.o.d.y bookend by his head."

"What did you do then?" I asked, though I was beginning to have a suspicion.

"I panicked. I was afraid someone would find him, and know that I'd come into the barn to talk to him. I figured the longer it took them to find him, the less chance anyone would jump to the wrong conclusion and suspect me. So I thought maybe if they didn't find the body ..."

"So you hid it."

"In the trunk," he said, nodding. "It was right there. And I put the bookend in, too."

"And you took the key with you and hid it in a bowl of old keys."

"Yes," he said. "I was just going to throw it away somewhere, but as I was leaving, I saw the bowl of keys on one of the tables, so I wiped the trunk key off and threw it in there."

"And you ran away without even looking for your books."

"I looked," he said. "They weren't there."

I studied his face. He looked embarra.s.sed, depressed, defensive, hostile, and generally miserable. But I had no idea if he looked truthful. For all I knew, he could still be covering something up.

I wasn't convinced he didn't have motive for murder. But I also had a hard time imagining that he could bludgeon Gordon to death with the bookend. He looked like the sort of person whose idea of taking stern and decisive action was to write a querulous letter to the Caerphilly Clarion, and then whine for weeks if the editor pruned a single adverb. Perhaps I should let him fret for a while, and try to find either confirmation that Gordon had been dead already when Schmidt entered the barn or something to disprove it.

"So who do you think did it?" I asked.

He frowned.

"I don't want to cast undue suspicion on someone else," he said.

"Why not?" I said. "The more suspicion you cast on someone else, the less likely the police will focus on you."

"You're not telling the police!" he exclaimed.

"Give me a reason not to," I said. "Tell me who you think did it."

"Well, I don't know that he did it," Schmidt said. "But as I was coming in, I did see Ralph Endicott, leaving through the other door."

"Endicott-Gordon's old partner?"

"That's him. Seemed in a bit of a hurry, too," he added, warming to his subject. "And goodness knows, after everything Gordon did to him, he has no reason to like the man."

"Okay," I said. "If I can prove Endicott's the murderer, maybe the police won't have to find out what you did. At least not the part about Mrs. Pruitt's books."

"Thank you," Schmidt said. "You can't imagine how grateful I'd be."

I decided not to point out that my statement contained a very large "if" with a great big "maybe" attached. And it occurred to me that before I let Schmidt completely off the hook, it might be a good idea to find out if he had any influence with any of the Great Stone Faces. If so, maybe I could pressure him into using it to our benefit.

Did that thought make me as despicable a blackmailer as Gordon?

I'd think that through later.

"Stay away from Gordon's shop," I said. "If I hear anything more about a break-in, I'll tell the police everything."

"Of course," he said, hastily. "I was just about to go home. I realize what a mistake it was, thinking of breaking in."

"That's a load of owl pellets," I said, in lieu of a ruder word. He looked puzzled, and I decided to leave him that way. He walked off quickly, as if in a hurry to get away from me.

I was turning toward the alley when I suddenly decided that I was tired. Why go the long way round? Why not just march right past the front of Gordon's shop? If the chief saw me and wondered what I was up to, maybe it was time to tell him everything. I'd found proof that Gordon was already dead when Giles went into the barn. Let the police decide which of the other suspects was guilty.

I wouldn't even have to tell them about Schmidt. All I had to do was sic them on the Hummel lady, and they'd follow the same trail I did.

Of course, by the time I realized that, the police cruisers were gone and Gordon's shop locked up tight. So much for good resolutions.

Still, I could do something. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the non-emergency number for the police station. The chief wasn't in, of course, but Debbie Anne, the dispatcher, apologized very nicely and said she'd give him a message if I liked.

"Tell him the Hummel lady lied," I said. "And he should talk to her again."

"The who?"

"Hummel lady," I said, and spelled it. "I don't know her name, but the chief will know who I mean. Or he can call me if he likes."

I felt much more cheerful. My conscience was clear. The chief couldn't accuse me of sneaking around behind his back-well, not as easily, anyway. And, meanwhile, maybe I could get even closer to the truth if I could find Ralph Endicott, the ex-partner. I had a feeling I knew where to look. The last time I'd seen him, he'd been lurking near the fence around the yard sale, scanning the merchandise with his binoculars and scribbling notes in a leather-bound notebook. I needed to get back to the yard sale.

Easier said than done, though. As I was making my way out of town, I thought I spotted Mother, disappearing into a shop. I circled the block again and cruised past the shop at five miles per hour, but I couldn't see anything, and I drove on, hoping I'd been seeing things. Even the thought of Mother entering that particular shop made me nervous. Not only was it a bastion of chintz and gilding, but there wasn't a single price tag in the shop, on the theory that if you cared about the price, you couldn't afford it and they couldn't be bothered with you.

And then I hit a giant traffic jam that blocked the road leading toward our house for most of the ten miles I had to travel. I thought I was home free when I finally inched past the spot where a replacement funnel cake truck had broken down on its way out to set up operations at our house, but, instead, the traffic got even worse. Not many people were leaving, but the few that did had to fight their way out. Enough cars had parked along the shoulders on either side that the already narrow road was down to a single lane for much of the last two miles, and the arriving cars gave no mercy. Here and there, arguments and even the occasional fistfight broke out. The fields on either side of the road were festooned with stranded SUVs and jeeps whose owners thought they could bypa.s.s the traffic by taking to the countryside, only to find they'd misjudged either their vehicles' ability to traverse deep mud or their own driving skills. Cousin Sidney and his tow truck would be tired but happy by the end of the day.

I finally made it in on the heels of an arriving state police cruiser and scared away a woman who tried to take my parking s.p.a.ce when I removed the orange cones. Not bad considering that she was driving a Chevy TrailBlazer that could have eaten my little Toyota for breakfast. But she wasn't very good at what I called slow motion chicken. Her tank was new and spotless, and my heap showed definite signs of past close encounters with other vehicles, so when I kept moving forward into the s.p.a.ce, slowly but inexorably, she eventually wimped out and backed away.

"I was here first!" she shrieked, as I was walking away from my car.

"I live here!" I shouted back.

"And that makes you special?" I heard her mutter.

The whole day was getting out of hand. Some of Michael's drama students had shown up and were presenting scenes from various plays by Shakespeare, using our front porch as a makeshift stage. The college chamber music ensemble was impatiently awaiting their turn, and from the noises emerging from the house, either someone had held a seance and offended the ghost of John Philip Sousa or the college marching band needed a lot more rehearsal before we let them onto the porch.

Apparently Rose Noir had finished smudging the circ.u.mference of the yard sale, and was now putting the finishing touches to her cleansing ceremony from on high, thanks to Everett's boom lift. I wasn't sure it was wise to supplement the herbal smoke with scattering dried herbs, but anyone who had stuck it out this long at the yard sale wasn't about to be put off by showers of potpourri. At most, a few people looked mildly annoyed as they brushed it off their shoulders like fragrant dandruff.

The volunteer vendors now completely filled the front yard and had begun to expand into the field across the road from us. Normally our front yard had a restful view of the field sloping at first gently, and then more and more steeply, up to a tree-crowned ridge. Now we had a ringside view of more ad hoc yard sale partic.i.p.ants.

I found Michael observing this phenomenon with alarm.

"Mr. Early won't like this," he said. Mr. Early, the farmer who owned the field across the way, was a noted local curmudgeon.

"Maybe he's out of town," I said.

"Isn't October supposed to be a busy time for farmers?" Michael said. "Harvest time, and all that."

"I think it depends on what you're growing."

"What does Mr. Early grow?" Michael asked.

We both squinted at the field for a few moments.

"Beats me," he said. "Just looks like gra.s.s to me."

"Maybe it is just gra.s.s," I said. "I think I've seen sheep there."

"Are you sure?"

"Not really," I said. "I suppose that shows what complete city slickers we are. I'll ask Dad."

"You think he'll know?"

"Maybe, and if he doesn't, he'll have a great time finding out. Maybe he'll even befriend Mr. Early."

"That would be nice," Michael said. "Though from what I've seen of Mr. Early, it would probably be a first. Meanwhile, I think I'll go over and tell those people that they're trespa.s.sing on Mr. Early's land."

"You really think they'll listen?"

"No, but at least I can tell Mr. Early that we told them to leave," he said, as he strode off.